Seb FoxAllen

Writer, Satirist

Seb is a Toronto-based writer and satirist. As a faculty member at Toronto's Academy of the Impossible, he comments on the relationship between technology and culture with particular emphasis on notions of media, politics, language, and governance. He tweets primarily as @purpledocket and blogs regularly at Please Revise and insertimage.

The person managing DiGiorno's account quickly realized the he had used a hashtag about domestic violence to sell pizzas. He deleted the original tweet and appeared to compose personal apologetic responses to anyone who had voiced disapproval. Compare this to the reaction to a promotion tweeted by Spirit Airlines last week.

What's lost in discourses lauding evidence-based policy is the nagging sense of agency over the policy directions we pursue; the concessions our ideologies are forced to support. Faced with that choice, I'll take argument-based policy every time.

You may have noticed variations of the term "online trolling" creeping their way into the style guides of your favourite news outlets over the past year. What the Internet need not attempt is to expunge trolls. Instead, the digital class must work towards a renegotiation of its idioms. A key part of this process will be coaxing more nuance from terms like trolls and trolling, insisting on new ways of delineating the undesirable from the criminal: the process from the by-product. Resist the rush to concede the perch of the troll; it's all many of us have left.

Before we rehash our collective rage towards Facebook, Google and any other elective service that subsidizes our online interactions, the pervasive reality must be stated: We want our personal information in cyberspace, and we wouldn't lock it up if given the chance. The collection and leveraging of private data is perhaps the single defining characteristic of what we consider to be an attractive, familiar internet.

Today, The Rosedale Club -- which has no formal website, instead operating through personal tweets, Facebook event pages, and a Gmail address -- announced that their next meeting would be held on July 1, and feature "guest of honour" Conrad Black. Inevitably, critiques culminated in the all-too-familiar refrain: "What's with all the white guys?"

A yet-unpublished video of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford allegedly making inappropriate statements while ingesting crack-cocaine has (somewhat predictably) garnered international attention over the past week...